Cooking with Linux - Eye Candy for Admins? Aye, SuperKaramba!

You see, François, administering your Linux system is all about
information. When it comes down to knowing what is happening with our
servers, too much information is just about right. Yes,
mon ami,
I am joking, but only a little.
Every Linux system has an ongoing chatter, whether it is a server or a desktop. Statistics
constantly are pouring in on CPU activity, disk space and memory allocation
and logs are being filled. Don't forget logs, François, logs of e-mail
traffic, FTP and Web site transfers, services starting and stopping.
That's a lot to keep up with, and having the right tools is essential.

Quoi? It looks like eye candy? Well, it is, François. No one
said keeping track of what your systems are up to couldn't be fun, not to
mention stylish. But enough of this. Our guests will be here any moment,
and we must be ready. Mon Dieu!, they are here already. Welcome,
everyone, to Chez Marcel, home of fine Linux fare and excellent wines.
Please sit and I will have François fetch the wine. To the wine cellar,
François! Bring back the 2000 Chablis Les Clos.
Vite!

Make yourselves comfortable mes amis. The theme
of this issue is system administration, and any one of
us who runs any kind of computer—even if it's only a
home system—is the administrator of that system.
You are the boss, mes amis. Sometimes, you
are the boss of many, and sometimes you are your own
boss. Now you all know what they say about system
administrators, non? A good system administrator
is forewarned, and as the saying goes, forewarned is
forearmed. Four arms, of course, is a highly unusual
number of arms for a sysadmin to have; although many,
I'm sure, could see the advantage. It is because of
this inherent strangeness that I present you with
today's menu, a collection of graphical tools that
should keep you informed while adding a certain je
ne sais quoi to your system.

Desktop wallpaper is interesting enough, but dynamic
applications can be put on the desktop as well. For instance, imagine a monitor for
CPU usage, disk space and network activity floating transparently on your
desktop, constantly being updated. If this sounds interesting,
get your hands on Adam Geitgey's SuperKaramba. The Super in
front of Karamba might lead you to believe there was a predecessor
to this package, and you would be right. Hans Karlsson is the author
of the original Karamba. To see a wonderfully busy SuperKaramba
desktop, have a look at Figure 1.

Figure 1. SuperKaramba
themes are informative and look cool.

Pick up the latest source at the SuperKaramba Web site (see the on-line
Resources section).
Building the package is something with which most of you are
familiar—the extract and build five-step:

You need Python development libraries to build the package from
source. For those who would prefer to skip all that compiling,
links are provided on the main SuperKaramba page, along with precompiled binaries
for several distributions. If you do decide to compile SuperKaramba and
are running KDE 3.2, you may encounter a little weirdness. This
also might be fixed in the source code by the time you read
this, but themes are always on top, blocking other active windows.
Fix this by editing the karamba.cpp file in the src
directory after you extract the source. Look for the line that reads:

KWin::setType(winId(), NET::Dock);

and comment it out by adding two slashes in front of the line,
like this:

// KWin::setType(winId(), NET::Dock);

That's it. Go ahead with your compile and all is well.

Start SuperKaramba from the command line with
superkaramba. The program also
shows up in my KDE Utilities menu. When the
program starts, you see a window offering
you three choices (Figure 2).
Mon Dieu! François, bring the wine here
immï¿½iatement and refill my glass. It seems
that some Python did sneak into the code after all.

Figure 2. The SuperKaramba
Startup Screen

Clicking Open lets you select from SuperKaramba themes already
installed on your system. As of this writing, the themes section of the
SuperKaramba site had not yet been launched. You instead were directed to
the Karamba section of KDE-Look.org.
Look for Karamba in the menu on the left. The various themes
are arranged by several criteria you can select by clicking the
tabs above the list. Browse by the most recent or most popular in terms
of downloads or highest rated.

Each Karamba theme shows a screenshot and provides a download. Choose
something appropriate, then download and extract the tarball to an appropriate
directory. Some of these are tarred and gzipped, others are tarred
and bzipped. There is no hard-and-fast rule as to where themes end up
living, because the open dialog lets you find them anywhere. I created
a directory called Karamba where I store my files. Let's say that
Kelley at table 16 wanted to load Flavio Gargiulo's Micromon theme
(Figure 3), a trimmed-down version of Simon Ask Ulsnes' Minimon,
which comes in a tarred and gzipped bundle. He would do the following:

cd ~/Karamba_dir
tar -xvf 8722-micromon-1.0.tar.gz

Figure 3. Micromon systems stats float across your desktop.

On the other hand, if Jon at table 9 wanted to install Matti's
Liquid Weather theme (Figure 4), which comes in a bzip2 tarred bundle,
he would use this command:

cd ~/Karamba_dir
tar -xjvf lwp-1.9.tar.bz2

Figure 4. The Liquid
Weather theme can be modified to report on any location.

Perhaps a weather theme isn't strictly sysadmin material, but that's
Jon for you. In any case, there's no other building or installing.
Extract the files, and you are done. Then, navigate to the install
directory and look for the file with a .theme extension.
Click that file and click OK. The theme starts up and appears on your
desktop.

Launching subsequent themes doesn't require you to re-run
superkaramba. Instead, right-click on a running theme and choose
Open new theme. Right-clicking on a running theme provides several
menu options, including the ability to edit a currently running theme or
its configuration file (Figure 5). Theme files generally are easy
to read and lend themselves to simple edits. For instance, I modified
the Micromon theme (Figure 1) to display my own disk partitions instead
of the ones defined by the author. I also increased the font size to
make it easier to read.

Figure 5. Editing a
SuperKaramba .theme File

To move a theme around on your desktop, hold down the Alt key,
left-click with the mouse and drag the SuperKaramba theme to wherever
you want it located on your desktop. That positional information is
stored in .rc files located in the .superkaramba
directory in your home directory. Mine, for instance, is in
/home/marcel/.superkaramba. Before you go looking at the
.rc file for one of your running themes, I should warn you
about an interesting effect. Until you shut down a theme or log out,
the .rc file remains blank. One way to write out the file
without shutting down the application is to right-click on the running
theme and select Reload theme. Here's a sample from Ryan
Nickell's skSeti desktop application, a small theme that monitors my
SETI@home progress:

You should find a great number of
SuperKaramba themes available. Some are Kicker panel
replacements, like Sven Johannsen's Glass Machine
(pictured on the bottom of Figure 1). Aside from
giving you slick access to your kicker functions,
the Glass Machine also makes all your XMMS controls
handy. A little music helps sysadmins get their work
done, and several jukebox and multimedia toys are available
to choose from on the site.

Other themes are just plain fun, such as Reverant2501's TubeClock with
seconds. Older readers should find a comforting nostalgia there, and
the younger crowd simply may think it looks cool. More useful are
packages such as Chip 2003's TDE (T Desktop Enhancements),
which provides a number of tools, including a notepad and a log viewer, as well as
disk, memory and performance monitors. Chip 2003 also provides another nice
multimonitor, TMon.
There's more, but let me leave you with one final monitor to experience.
It's called The (as in the only) Karamba theme. It's from artoo,
and it's a GkRellm-like monitor for SuperKaramba—everything you need
to know in one vertical monitor.

All of these SuperKaramba improvements provide a means for you to
stay informed and look good doing it. Once you start playing with
these themes, you may become the most informed administrator out there.
Unfortunately, you may not be the most productive—just a little joke,
mes amis.

It appears that closing time quickly approaches—Mon
Dieu!
But I can see that you all are engrossed at
your various desktops installing themes to suit your individual tastes.
Perhaps François will be kind enough to refill your glasses once more
while you experiment.
Until next time, mes amis, let us all drink to one
another's health. A votre santé Bon appétit!

Marcel Gagné (mggagne@salmar.com) lives in Mississauga,
Ontario. He is the author of Moving
to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye! (ISBN
0-321-15998-5) from Addison Wesley. His first book is the highly
acclaimed Linux System Administration: A User's
Guide
(ISBN 0-201-71934-7). In real life, he is president of Salmar Consulting,
Inc., a systems integration and network consulting firm.